Time to U1: 3 months
Time to U2: 1 month
Time to U3: 3 weeks (!?)
You guys are bangin.
Windows 10, 22H2
AMD Ryzen 5900X
32 Gb DDR4-3600
Nvidia RTX 4070
4k @60hz, v-sync
VKB Gladiator NXT and mouselook ftw
Time to U1: 3 months
Time to U2: 1 month
Time to U3: 3 weeks (!?)
You guys are bangin.
@Seifer omg this changelog tho … it’s almost like a major release!
https://www.falcon-bms.com/changelogs/falcon-bms-4-36-update-1/
new training missions? new cockpit textures? new/improved AI and JTAC interactions?
improved ACMI recording? improved models? and docs? the list just goes on…
I was only expecting a few CTD fixes and maybe the AIM-120 thing.
this is amazing work, BMS team, in just a few short months! can’t wait to try it out…
@chihirobelmo forget the code, I think many of us are excited to see that you’re a member of the dev team now!
I have no vote for or against Steam integration but I want to take a moment to acknowledge the huge changes BMS has already undertaken, in the past 12 months, to reduce the barrier(s) to entry and increase visibility.
easy downloader and updater – no more bittorrent! no more needing to maintain a setup/staging folder for updates!
much easier to sign on to the new forum… better search features, and also google indexing of threads!
integration of Alt Launcher (which has caused added confusion in the near term, for some old timers, but still must admit it is a huge net win for newb-friendliness)
the recent, huge overhaul of virtually all the main docs
dozens of new youtube videos, incl from the devs and doc authors
lots of under-the-hood improvements to make the code work better, by default, out of the box, for a wider variety of modern desktop systems… sometimes little things, like making borderless-mode the default, go a long way to removing technical barriers and reducing confusion
release cadence brought down from ~3 years to ~3 months to ~3 weeks!
Yes, true it’s still not anything like a one-click Steam download or a retail, shrink-wrapped software experience… but it has moved so far in that direction, over the past year… certainly more than I ever thought it would.
“Falcon BMS - As Legit as it Gets”
Congrats, BMS team!
tip 1- long-press Uncage in AG mode, to switch to STRF.
tip 2- small controlled bursts… think of it as a shotgun, not a machine-gun.
tip 3- I never knew this until I saw it on someone’s youtube video… the TGP will go into a “CCIP” mode focusing on the area of projected impact.
The MFD will refuse to become SOI so it helps to get your preferred zoom factor dialed in, before switching to STRF. (I think I like 2x wide fov … but ymmv)
The TGP is a game-changer!
bonus tip 4- have a good, long-lasting flare program… like 1/sec for 12 sec (or longer). angry people are going to be shooting manpads at you.
the bullets in BMS appear to “time out” after ~2.5nm range… so it seems not possible to spray downward from 20k ft, staying out of manpad and shilka range
It’s range is 57nmi
If a Tu-160 blackjack bomber is screaming straight toward you at mach 2.3 and does not maneuver at all… and you are screaming straight toward it at mach 1.2… and both of you are at 35k ft or higher… and you fire the missile at optimal loft trajectory when the blackjack is 56.51 mi away… and you work for Raytheon and your job title is Marketing Manager… then you might reasonably say the AIM-120C range is 57 mi.
@digle said in Small EOY update...:
Is there a reason about this short period of time between releases since 4.35 ?
Remember 4.33 took several years to be debugged
New debugging tools ? Change of the software architecture ?
I’m not a BMS dev so folks can correct me if I’m wrong. Just looking from the outside, I saw a few new tools, and things happen since 2020… beyond the inside-baseball stuff Seifer outlined.
the move to x64 only, and end of life for Win7 (and soon Win8) reduces the test-matrix by a lot
I think in mid 2021 (sometime early/mid 4.35 era), the dev team started using AppVerifier [1] to catch mem leaks, double-free bugs, and heap buffer-overruns … uncaught SEH exceptions, etc. and other related tricks eg. /GZ or /RTC compiler flag, for debug-builds, to catch stack buffer-overruns.
One can imagine there was probably a huge logjam of noise in those initial reports… imagine 20 years of accumulated bugs (and starting out with a lot, lol)! But through heroic efforts of Seifer and other devs, once the random noise of dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of nondeterministic CTD bugs is squashed… at some point you begin to cross an inflection point, enjoying increased velocity in all other aspects of development and testing.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/application-verifier
Definitely the hardest part of C/C++ development is enforcing clear lifecycle-ownership of memory and other resources (network connections, file handles, COM objects, etc)… C++ smart-pointers, combined with RAII [2] mindset, is the best “tool” I know of to tackle that.
[2] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/raii
Those things were there before 4.35, but it seems like a clear change in strategy to embrace them, as loosely coupled dependencies. (eg. the default ACMI format no longer compat with the builtin playback feature.)
hopefully we’ll never replace Lt Cmdr Stephen Hawking as LSO
@Z00Li do you have a “Glacier.rul” file in your Config folder? for some reason it seems to be wrong file-size.
(and is it something you manually copied over, after reinstalling BMS?)
try renaming it … (ie. make a backup then delete it)
@Atlas iirc it’s mostly 20nm but with some exceptions, eg. for long-range SAMs
and as you use various sensors… FCR and TGP… will deaggregate units in a longer cone of view
@kendoric2 said in Error when doing keyinds:
FalconBMS Launcher v2.4.0
This bug is fixed in AL v2.4.1.5 and later – update your BMS to 4.37.3.2
@Atze-0 there is a SEM side-extension module that adds ~12 buttons and 2 analog axes
that provides something closer to a two-handed hotas experience, but only takes up one spot on your desk / one USB port
@mjones is there some special “Quadro Experience” software instead of “GeForce Experience”? (idk)
@TS_riders tell me about the little levers on the bottom, alongside the throttle
are they analog axes, or just up/down buttons or what
I have the older version, they are rotary encoders…
I’m wondering if they updated the device pid/vid… can you paste the content of your DeviceSorting.txt file here?
@Icarus there seems like several different bad-things going on, in the logs above… both AL and BMS were crashing on startup in different ways… and network errors reading the RSS feeds
If the one remaining problem is still this
Source: System.Configuration
Target Site: Void PrepareConfigSystem()
Message: Configuration system failed to initialize
Details: System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: '.', hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character. Line 16, position 1. (C:\Users\Mati\AppData\Local\Benchmark_Sims\FalconBMS_Alternative_Lau_Url_nrsongii2ww4hznqpokzgss145le5q0d\2.4.1.5\user.config line 16) ---> System.Xml.XmlException: '.', hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character. Line 16, position 1
Then you have a corrupt (!?) xml preferences file … which I have never heard happening to anyone…
Remedy is to delete C:\Users\Mati\AppData\Local\Benchmark_Sims\FalconBMS_Alternative_Lau_Url_nrsongii2ww4hznqpokzgss145le5q0d\2.4.1.5\user.config
… don’t worry, there’s not much there, it just remembers which checkboxes you had selected in AL. it will be recreated.
But I still worry, what else is corrupt? It seems like you had a power-failure of bluescreen or something, right at the moment AL was saving its state and launching BMS.
@Mati definitely make a backup of everything in your User/Config subfolder
Your key bindings are in BMS-Auto.key and your hotas bindings are in Setup*.xml files
I worry something very bad has happened to your PC. Try to make backups of everything important. Then run disk diagnostics.